Rites of rhetoric: Toni Morrison, Luis Valdez, and critical race theory

Critical race theory is typically considered a movement of legal scholars of color who explore how racial hierarchy is infused in the habits, rituals and procedures of everyday life and how those cultural practices permeate the structure and metaphors of legal discourses. In my dissertation, I argue that literary writers and cultural critics, such as Luis Valdez and Toni Morrison, share an intellectual space with legal scholars of color, such as Patricia Williams and Richard Delgado. By tracing the trajectory of the legal and literary writings of this group of intellectuals, I re-territorialize their work and, thus, re-map critical race theory under the rubrics of poststructural and postcolonial theories. These seemingly disparate writers constitute one common movement because they each seek to displace the analysis of rights and legal discourse by focusing on the effects of cultural practices and racist fictions. They achieve this by relying on and developing the postcolonial practices of hybridity and catachresis. The slippage between rites and rights compels consideration of the complicity between cultural-literary practices and legal discourse. By articulating these relationships, a redefined critical race theory disrupts the logic of literary-legal reason and generates its persuasive power in rhetoric, the disruption and suspension of logic.